Terra Formars

I love the first season. Very good animation, battle and pace, it's a good shonen. However, the second season is very bad, the animation studio is not the same and you can clearly see it.

An incredibly interesting concept that is completely flushed down the toilet by awful execution. The art is pretty good and I liked the technical end of this anime but the writing and characterization were in most cases sub-par and in some cases genuinely bad. Near the end of season 1, I found myself desperately hoping that it would just end, as I just plain didn't care about any of the still-living characters or what they're doing, mainly because frankly they weren't doing anything except for punching monsters in character-unique ways.

In complete fairness, maybe season 2 fixes everything, but I never bothered watching it because season 1 was botched on so many levels. It's not a complete waste of time but I wish I had watched something else.

I don't know who censors these shows, but it gets so bad it's almost unwatchable. Pity too, because this is a good show.

Interestingly, there's no real central character, as in most animes. There's an ensemble of characters from different parts of the world, who have banded together to fly to Mars and colonise the planet. They have to battle giant, mutated, humanoid, super intelligent cockroaches (yes, really), who kill humans with the same indifference we have to killing cockroaches. The humans need to bring back some cockroaches to aid in developing a vaccine for some disease that's killing people on earth. That's the general premise of the show, and I thought it was interesting.

The problem is the execution. While the storyline is interesting, there isn't enough depth into it. A few more episodes and a better resolution and it could have been a great show. Without revealing spoilers, the ending only makes sense if a second season is planned. There's plenty of violence, but the censoring takes care of that. Worth a watch.

Both seasons are disappointing for different reasons.

Season 01: (4/10 Stars) Gore porn. I've seen reviews talking about how the brutality was key to the story and I'd buy that if they were consistent with it, the story was stronger and the brutality was logical.. Ripping someone spine out and then using it as a sword is just plain dumb. The one thing it did have going for it was killing off or crippling characters right as you "slightly" invested in them or they got interesting.

Season 02: (0/10 Stars) They took everything remotely good and flushed it down the drain. They strangely trying adding some Ecchi to the whole thing, cutesy word bubbles, blushing females flirting with the male characters, bad jokes and a complete lack of deaths (Other than random redshirts that have no names until after they die) Oh, and all the characters got insanely stupid, making criminally bad choices for what are supposed to be the elite of the elite..

I was extremely impressed with the anime. I've fully read the Manga and noticed very little to almost no changes in the anime. It is one of the few anime out there that follows 98% of the Manga to the letter. It's also delivered non-stop action in the uncensored version along with a spot on back story for everyone just like in the Manga. I highly recommend others to watch the anime and to read the Manga in hopes for more seasons to come. However I still have to state to only watch it uncensored due to extremely graphic content consistently happening in almost every episode. If you like GANTZ, or other violent/action sci- fi, this is the series for you.